International Women’s Day 2018: The History of IWD’s Socialist Roots

Historical context for celebrating on March 8.

As women from all different political backgrounds are coming together to fight back in a new era of misogyny under the Trump administration, a moment of reflection on International Women’s Day — celebrated every year on March 8 — provides historical context that present-day feminists can take inspiration from, even 100 years later.

While women from all ends of the political spectrum — some centrist, many progressive, and even some on the right — will fight back against misogyny on International Women’s Day in countries all over the world, the day has its roots in anti-capitalist and socialist feminism. In fact, International Women’s Day historically has had a remarkably socialist platform, dating back to the early 20th century.

In November 1909, immigrant women in their teens and 20s in New York City began an 11-week strike, or as many labor historians recall it, “the uprising of the 20,000.” In her book Women and Socialism, historian Sharon Smith explains that although the strike took more than two months during a brutal winter, the women won recognition for most local factories in Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Up until this point, their union had been male-dominated.

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“This strike, fought by thousands of young women who worked long hours in New York City’s garment factories, is one of the most important struggles in the history of the U.S. working class,” Smith tells Teen Vogue. “Most of the strikers were teenagers and immigrants, with young Jewish socialists playing a key role in leading the strike forward. At the time, union official leadership was almost entirely made up of men, but these women workers took charge of their own strike.”

According to Smith, the garment workers’ victory inspired the Socialist Party to organize “Women’s Day” marches across the country in March 1910. “The New York City march was a massive show of solidarity that included a large contingent of garment workers and featured demands for higher wages and better working conditions, along with support for Women’s Suffrage—since women were still denied the right to vote at that time,” Smith says. “But the inspiration of the garment workers reached around the world. German socialist Clara Zetkin proposed that ‘International Women’s Day’ be established as an annual holiday to the International Conference of Socialist Women in 1910.”

The tie between International Women’s day and socialism was made clear in Soviet Russia, too, Smith explains.

“On International Women’s Day in 1917, Russian women workers organized massive strikes and demonstrations under the theme ‘Opposition to the war, high prices, and the situation of the woman worker,' " Smith says. “The strike movement spread very quickly, overturning the czarist dictatorship and launching the Russian Revolution that achieved victory in October of that same year. If Russian women workers could overthrow a dictator by uniting together and going on strike, then surely women everywhere in the world today have the potential to accomplish major political change.”

“International Women’s Day, historically, has always been about highlighting the relationship between capitalism and women’s oppression, and that remains significant today,” Taylor tells Teen Vogue. “I think socialist feminism, as a political current, developed in the late 1960s and the 1970s. It certainly developed with the idea of connecting the historic aims of the socialist movement, which involved what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the radical reconstruction of American society.”

In other words, King believed that American society had to be dismantled and reconstructed in order to solve social inequalities, poverty, and other side effects of capitalism.

“I think most socialist feminists and Black feminists would say that in a radical reconstruction of the world, the aim of socialist feminism is to connect the idea that those who create the wealth in society should have democratic control over its distribution to the [areas in which] women have been oppressed in capitalist, but also pre-capitalist, class society,” Taylor says.

Essentially, socialist feminists believe workers should have ownership over their work. For instance, when the women garment workers were on strike in New York City, they were altogether advocating for higher pay as a way to take ownership over their work.

Today’s women’s rights movements have not entirely been driven by anti-capitalist ideals. While Taylor understands the valid arguments that some modern feminist organizers don’t have an explicit anti-capitalist critique, she also admits the organizers don’t necessarily represent the hundreds of thousands who marched across the country in January.

“[Modern women organizers] certainly have a critique of the status quo in our society and they recognize the importance of political protest and demonstrations, but in the last two years there was a vast range of women who have participated in the women’s marches, and some of the criticisms of the marches have focused on the middle class,” Taylor says.

While many women organize today against the president and his administration, it’s also crucial to understand the larger patriarchal system that socialist feminists have been fighting for the past 100 years all over the world. When change and progress seem impossible, we can turn to moments—such as the garment workers strike, Soviet Russia, and the Combahee River Collective—to inspire us to keep going.